| Composed of two essays, this dissertation tries to fill in a gap between the demand and the supply side of courts by providing an economic theory of judicial decision-making. The focus of the first essay is placed on the Circuit Court judges' decisions regarding whether or not to follow the Supreme Court precedents. I investigate how the following factors interact with each other in judicial decisions on whether to follow the precedents or not: judges' ideologies, the value of precedents, and reputation (in-circle and public).;In the second essay, I will analyze empirically Supreme Court justices' decision-making. The most intrinsic problem is that cases before the Court are not necessarily independent of the justices. When a justice took part in deciding a precedent of a current case, her present decision should be affected by her past decision. Thus without controlling for this path-dependent effect, any test cannot help but be incomplete. Focusing on their votes categorized by an ideological direction, I develop a model that explicitly considers individual justices' voting on the precedents. Using about 600 relations of the Supreme Court cases between a later decision and a precedent, I quantify the effects of institutional and individual stare decisis, and furthermore, decompose various factors affecting individual justice's decision-making. |
